Looking at Glass with Kids

By Lani

2013-02-23 11:10:52

[caption id="attachment_5682" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="What I'm learning along the edge...."][/caption]
So, yesterday I’m standing in front of a dozen kindergarten kids who are about to take a tour of our glass factory.
I’m trying to explain to them how cold glass holds the history of its prior liquid state - we call it the "heat history" - and how that liquid quality shows along the soft, rolled, wavy edge of the sheet.
[caption id="attachment_5683" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Musing on transformation..."][/caption]
Thinking that the concept of history might be challenging to creatures who maybe don’t think much further back than breakfast, I ask “Can someone tell me what ‘history’ is?”
A small boy shouts out “LIES”
Another five year old voice suggests “Stuff that people make up”
There are sixty years - and obviously an immense evolutionary span - between my own childhood and the one these kids seem to be living. At their age I thought that History was a kind of Truth. It came in books. My Mom told me about it. It had a reality that was tangible and honest and that I could see in buildings and places and – again – read about in books. It would never have occurred to me that it was just LIES. (I don't think I got that until high school social studies class)
Today I am trying to decide whether these kids are brilliant or just preternaturally cynical. And I am looking at the world with a whole other set of eyes.
[caption id="attachment_5684" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="And yes, I'd love to hear what Judith Schaechter might say to these kids about History..."][/caption]
- Lani
PS. What does this have to do with glass? Everything. It is just further confirmation that it’s not about Glass. It’s about the other places that glass takes us.